Towards a «creative memory»

Shoah and fiction in 20th-21st century French literature

Abstract

What status should be accorded to the “truth” of fiction with respect to the memory of the concentration camps? The article takes up the debate sparked by the famous Adornian interdiction on poetry after Auschwitz, to highlight how the novel is indicated, both by some survivors of the camps (such as Antelme and Semprun), and by the writers of the post-Shoah (from Perec to Camille de Toledo), as the only way out of a form of memory that has now become almost "pathological", because it is obsessive, institutionalized and emptied of its true essence. The contemporary era, marked by new challenges, such as the Covid-19 emergency and the war in Ukraine, which have awakened dark parallels with the Shoah and new denials, manifests more than ever the need for a “creative memory” (Imre Kertész) - pacified, communitarian, renewed in the transitivity of its message -, able to tell what it was, without forgetting to give new forms to the future.

Keywords

[EN] Shoah, memory, truth, fiction, novel